You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Sujatha Subramanian's description of her twice-weekly work in psychotherapy with Eileen over a period of two years highlights for me some particular characteristics of fostered children.
Eileen has suffered repeated losses in her short life. We do not know anything about the death of either her mother or grandmother. Were they sudden and unexpected, or after long illnesses, which could have meant the fading away and increasing lack of availability of each of her caregivers? I suspect the latter, certainly with the grandmother. We see Eileen repeatedly projecting into her therapist a sense of hopelessness of ever being able to pull her object/mother/therapist to her or to sustain her interest for more than a flicker of time. It seems that Eileen really wants her therapist to know what that experience feels like, to hold it, and explore it in herself before attempting to return it to her patient. Eileen needs this experience sufficiently often to know that she has an object/therapist capable of Bion's reverie and alpha function. I think this is why the early phase of the therapy proceeded so slowly. Eileen needed that time before she could involve her therapist in the mazes of her life.
The slow process of the work is a frequent feature of work with fostered children who are not yet permanently placed. They have been abandoned by their birth parent (s) and, in Eileen's case, by death twice and by the sudden accident and disappearance of her father. The abandonment is real. Eileen was showing both her foster mother Jane and her therapist that she had come close herself to abandoning hope of finding an object capable of surviving her anger and omnipotence; losing hope of a secure attachment.